David Andre, PhD

David Andre is the Chief Science officer of X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, where he leads scientific strategy and research across one of the more ambitious applied research organizations in industry. He earned a B.S. in symbolic systems and B.A. in psychology from Stanford in 1994, then completed his Ph.D. in computer science at UC Berkeley in 2003, where his dissertation on programmable reinforcement learning agents contributed to the theory of how autonomous agents can be given structured, hierarchically decomposable behavioral programs to improve learning efficiency. Before completing his doctorate, he had already helped found Blue Pumpkin Software, pioneering workforce scheduling algorithms, and later served as director of informatics at BodyMedia, where he led algorithm development for wearable physiological monitoring using data from hundreds of thousands of individuals. He co-founded the quantitative hedge fund Cerebellum Capital in 2008 and served as its CEO and CTO until 2020, when he joined X as chief science officer. At X, he leads a team of mathematicians and machine learning experts working on moonshots including applications of AI to power grids, supply chains, and biological design. He holds more than 65 peer-reviewed publications and numerous patents.